Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
We are creatures of story.
I was always influenced by language.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.